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Hybrid cloud – our world for decades to come

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s ‘crack team of researchers’ found out that global IT workloads are increasing, as is the cloud-based share of these workloads; by 2021 about 50-percent of these workloads (north of 200 million operating system instances) would be on the cloud, while the balance would be in traditional IT environments.

Of these 50-percent cloud-based workloads, 30-percent would be on public clouds while 20-percent would be hosted in private cloud environments. By 2030, public cloud would be hosting a majority of workloads at 52-percent, while private clouds would account for 29-percent.

Today, most companies are going the hybrid cloud way, putting their workloads on a combination of public cloud and private cloud as it is supposed to yield the optimum result in terms of performance, scalability and security.

(L-R): Gelsinger, IBM’s LeBlanc and their joint customer from Marriot Group, Alan Rosa who is SVP of Tech Delivery and Security

But building out a private cloud can be a daunting task, and VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) is touted to be their next iteration of the hyperconverged infrastructure, something they began with a software bundling of Virtual SAN, vSphere and vCenter Server for management.

VCF is a step closer towards their vision of the software-defined data centre (SDDC) with vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX and also SDDC Manager.

Gelsinger described that with VCF now, “…we make the private cloud easy.”

Hybrid – our world for decades to come?

The CEO also observed service providers today, becoming managed cloud providers for their customers and stated, “… a lot of vCloud Air partners are having success here. This is a huge area that is growing for service providers.”

In fact, VCF is also delivered as-a-service by VMware’s vCloud Air Network service provider ecosystem. Notably, IBM is the first cloud partner to offer VCF as a fully automated service, and IBM’s Senior Vice President for IBM Cloud, Robert LeBlanc described that instead of taking eight to ten weeks to stand up a cloud data centre, they are able to help customers set up in a matter of hours.

But being able to use a combination of private and public clouds, holds a lot of appeal still for businesses.

It is also the perfect scenario for VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture to leverage off, by enabling VMware customers to run, manage, connect and secure their apps across different clouds and devices, in a common operating environment.